All the recent moves of Mozilla make me feel that they are really taking the XFree86 path. Reading the Launchpad bug log about the EULA shows that most of the posters agree on who is on the wrong side, and favor switching to IceWeasel or Epiphany+Webkit. Even if Mozilla is apparently going to back off on the EULA story, it looks like the harm was done. If they want to fix that, they will have to start listening to other players in the Free Software community. Or just watch Webkit eat their market share. Since Ubuntu leaders are apparently talking to Mozilla about that, I really hope that they are aiming for a solution that will help the Free Software community as a whole, and are not looking for a work-around that will “fix” the problem for Ubuntu. There has been a lot of noise about the lack of “giving back” to the community by Ubuntu. Using Ubuntu user base to weight in and solve such issues in a way that benefit the whole community would probably be seen as a much more valuable contribution than another bunch of patches.

Ubuntu is now being forced to show a EULA before letting users run Firefox, on pain of losing the rights to the Firefox trademark. (You know, End User License Agreements: those pop-ups Windows and Mac users have to put up with all the time, with the big “I Accept” button at the bottom.) Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu top dog, weighs in on the bug:

Please feel free to make constructive suggestions as to how we can meet Mozilla’s requirements while improving the user experience. It’s not constructive to say “WTF?”, nor is it constructive to rant and rave in allcaps. Your software freedoms are built on legal grounds, as are Mozilla’s rights in the Firefox trademark. To act as though your rights are being infringed misses the point of free software by a mile.

This is a bit surprising, and a bit disappointing. Both the decision itself, and Mark’s take on it, are quite wrong. One of the most important benefits of free software is the legal agreement you work in. You don’t have to agree to some long contract every time you need to do something new on your system, or sometimes even when you get a “critical update” to something you’re already doing. You don’t have to read pages of legalese, or go through some long process with your company’s legal department, or just click the “make it go away” button with this vague unease that you’ve just signed your first-born child away to the Devil. Most importantly, you feel like you actually own your computer when you run free software on it. When you enter a situation where you always have to ask permission to do things, and have to be constantly reminded of the rules, you don’t feel comfortable. Clearly, the thing in front of you is not yours, whatever your credit card bill might say; if it were, there wouldn’t be all this stress over you doing something the real owners don’t like. Free software returns your computer to you, by guaranteeing that you don’t have to enter into all these contracts before you can use it. Well, unless that “free” software is Firefox 3.0.2 or later, it seems. It’s “free” by a technical definition (you can strip the Firefox trademark rather easily, and get rid of the EULA as well). But when users fire up Ubuntu, and decide to do some browsing, and get confronted with pages of legal garbage and ALL CAPS, they will ask: “What’s so different about this open source stuff? I thought I was getting rid of all this legal crap.” And, suddenly, they’re slogging through the same drudgery they had to endure with every Windows service pack, and they wonder what they’ve gained. Perhaps there is a price we should be willing to pay to help Mozilla preserve their trademarks, but this price is too great. Mozilla should never have asked this of us, and Ubuntu should never have decided, on our behalf, that this price was acceptable. Debian has already turned its back on Firefox, and I have yet to have a problem with Iceweasel (the branding Debian chose for its Firefox-alike) that was caused by the branding change. But I’m tempted to bring it back, in Debian’s “non-free” software repository. Perhaps we could provide Firefox, complete with nasty EULA, but launch Iceweasel instead of Firefox if the user clicks “No”. There are probably all kinds of reasons why this is a bad idea, but I’m still drawn to the idea of illustrating how silly and useless click-through EULAs are. But it would be much more productive for Mozilla to back down, and not ask us to sacrifice such a large part of our identity on the altar of their sacred mark. UPDATE: First, I notice I was remiss in not giving a hat tip to Slashdot. Second, Mark has posted another comment on the bug. I encourage people to read the whole comment, but here’s a telling part:

For example, at the moment, we’re in detailed negotiations with a
company that makes a lot of popular hardware to release their drivers as
free software - they are currently proprietary. It would not be possible
to hold those negotiations if every step of the way turned into a public
discussion. And yet, engaging with that company both to make sure Ubuntu
works with its hardware and also to move them towards open source
drivers would seem to be precisely in keeping with our community values. In this case, we have been holding extensive, sensitive and complex
conversations with Mozilla. We strongly want to support their brand
(don’t forget this is one of the few companies that has successfully
taken free software to the dragons lair) and come to a reasonable
agreement. We want to do that in a way which is aligned with Ubuntu’s
values, and we have senior representatives of the project participating
in the dialogue and examining options for the implementation of those
agreements. Me. Matt Zimmerman. Colin Watson. Those people have earned
our trust.

On the one hand, yes, I believe that the Canonical people have earned our trust, and I do appreciate the utility of quiet persuasion with a proprietary software company that doesn’t understand our community. On the other hand, I had been under the impression that Mozilla was not a proprietary software company, and didn’t need persuasion and secret negotiations to see our point of view. Is Mozilla still a free software company, or not? UPDATE 2: Cautious optimism is appropriate, I think. Mitchell Baker, Mozilla chair:

We (meaning Mozilla) have shot ourselves in the foot here given the old, wrong content. So I hope we can have a discussion on this point, but I doubt we ll have a good one until we fix the other problems.

The actual changes aren’t available yet, and I wonder how much of this had been communicated to Canonical beforehand. Still, it’s a good sign.

A couple of years ago Debian had to change the name of Firefox to Iceweasel because Mozilla Corp. was using their trademark to impose conditions on the software that were not restricted by the license. Now the problem is brought again to life for Ubuntu, with Mozilla forcing them to show an EULA before letting users start Firefox. Jeff Licquia explains the situation quite well, in any case. At first glance, having to add an EULA seems a small price to pay, but underneath the obvious there might be something really serious happening. Software licenses seems to be just one of the possible ways of restricting users’ freedom. We’ve already seen some companies trying to use different methods to restrict it: via software patents, tivoization, etc. It seems we might want to add the usage of trademarks to the list. According to the Free Software Definition, there are four types of freedom that users need to have to consider a program as Free Software:

• To run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0)
• To study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1)
• To redistribute copies (freedom 2)
• To improve the program, and release your improvements (freedom 3)

In any case, nowhere is said that those freedoms must be given just to end users. Distributions and such must also have these freedoms, including the freedom to modify the program and adapt it to their needs, and their users’ needs. While it makes sense that you cannot call a program Firefox just because it includes 10 lines from its source code, it also doesn’t seem tolerable to try to use trademark to prevent you from adapting the program to your needs and keep calling it free. Is it valid that an organization or company tries to restrict that freedom for you by using their trademark rights? Should a clause preventing that be added to GPL4? In any case, the final reason for the discussion seems to be much ado about nothing, as the EULA does not, and cannot, add any restriction to the usage of the program. First freedom (to run the program, for any purpose), remember?

As I crawl through the social science literature a very painful endeavour, believe me it fills me with disgust to see how much bullshit is being spread as authors randomly insert citations into their text to back up some claim they need to argue their case. Often, the claim is something in which I am interested, so I go out and seek the reference they cite only to find that the referenced authors say nothing even remotely related to the claim for which they were cited. It is happening all over the place, and even in articles that appeared in renowned journals. If we ever get to the point where all academic articles are properly interlinked so that references can be automatically checked and I don t mean just checked for correctness of the reference data, but for actual correctness of the reference then the population of academics will probably shrink to single-digit percentages, at least for the social sciences; I don t recall it being much different when I was researching artificial intelligence a few years ago though. Until then, I am compiling a list. Whether I ll publish it and point journal editors at, or just send it to the journals depends on my mood at the time. NP: Guns n Roses: Appetite for Destruction

Due to their implementation by erasure, they face certain limitations.For example, the following constructor for a class with both compile time and runtime type checking:

class BagOf<T>  
  BagOf(Class<T> restrictionClass);
 

is not satisfiable when T is a generic class itself (since there is no ArraySet<Double>.class syntax, for example). The best work-around I know is to drop the T subclassing restriction for restrictionClass:

class BagOf<T>  
  BagOf(Class<?> restrictionClass);
 

The cost is low (obviously no difference at runtime) - you just don't assert that the developer using your class specifies a restriction class derived from the class T used in the generics. That won't prevent certain programming errors such as this anymore

BagOf<Integer> bar = BagOf<Integer>(Double.class)

but these shouldn't be too hard to find/fix anyway.Before submitting too clever suggestions, please make sure you've tested them. For example "if (obj instanceof T)" is not valid java code: since generics are implemented by erasure, T cannot be referenced in runtime statements.P.S. It would obviously be nice if the Java syntax would allow Foo<Bar>.class (which at runtime would be the same as Foo.class, and at complie time would have the result type Class<Foo<Bar>>), but currently it does not for all I know.P.P.S. I'm not looking for "Class<? extends T>", that is a different situation. The difficult case is when T is a Generic itself, not a subclass.Update: JM Ibanez pointed me to Neal Gafter's Super Type Tokens, which apparently are the same as TypeLiteral in Google Guice. Thanks!

Having already done some Debian packages of OCaml libraries, I wish to share my experience on what are the most common problems. The intent is to help people releasing OCaml libraries to have a good interaction with (Debian) packager. I think most of the tips should also apply to other distributions as well. I consider the use of findlib mandatory for this task as described in the Debian OCaml packaging policy. Problems listed here are common, and I have encountered them for my libraries... In fact, most of the time when I finished building a personnal OCaml library I package it for my own and to test that everything is fine. Being a packager and an upstream author is really a different job. "Upstream author" is used for people developing and releasing OCaml libraries and "packager" for people doing packages for a distribution. Here is the list of the most common problems and their solutions:

• Missing the "static link clause" in COPYING/LICENSE

Libraries are linked statically in OCaml. It is an advantage and a problem. But upstream author should remember that the LGPL license doesn't support static link directly. If you link an executable with the library statically, the executable is contaminated by the license. This error is probably the most problematic, because it requires to go through the whole project fixing license header for explaining that there is an exception to the LGPL. There is no way for a packager to fix this problem. Packager are not allowed to change the license. Library having this problem can be still packaged but complicate the legal aspect of building application using this library. Good example of this can be found in OCaml LICENSE itself :

As a special exception to the GNU Library General Public License, you
may link, statically or dynamically, a "work that uses the Library"
with a publicly distributed version of the Library to produce an
executable file containing portions of the Library, and distribute
that executable file under terms of your choice, without any of the
additional requirements listed in clause 6 of the GNU Library General
Public License.  By "a publicly distributed version of the Library",
we mean either the unmodified Library as distributed by INRIA, or a
modified version of the Library that is distributed under the
conditions defined in clause 2 of the GNU Library General Public
License.  This exception does not however invalidate any other reasons
why the executable file might be covered by the GNU Library General
Public License.

Followed by the text of the LGPL. Each file header looks like:

This file is distributed under the terms of the GNU Library General
Public License, with the special exception on linking described in 
file ../LICENSE.

• Forget that some architecture doesn't have an ocamlopt compiler

By far this is the most common error I have seen. Upstream author consider that you are able to build a native and byte version of their library. Unfortunately this is not the case for most architectures. This error is pretty simple to fix by separating byte and opt targets in Makefile. The ultimate test is to rename /usr/bin/ocamlopt and /usr/bin/ocamlopt.opt to something different and try to rebuild the library from scratch.

• Missing or incomplete META file

META file is the base of everything in findlib. This is very important to provide good META file because it helps other people to easily build thing over OCaml library. Each library should provide its own META file. Until now, Debian packager was used to write this missing META file and contribute it to upstream author. I think that now findlib has become a standard in OCaml developement, so upstream should take into consideration this file. A good test for META file is to install it and:

~$ ocaml
        Objective Caml version 3.10.1
# #use "topfind";;
- : unit = ()
Findlib has been successfully loaded. Additional directives:
  #require "package";;      to load a package
  #list;;                   to list the available packages
  #camlp4o;;                to load camlp4 (standard syntax)
  #camlp4r;;                to load camlp4 (revised syntax)
  #predicates "p,q,...";;   to set these predicates
  Topfind.reset();;         to force that packages will be reloaded
  #thread;;                 to enable threads
- : unit = ()
# #require "ZZZ";;

If you are able to load your library in ocaml toplevel, this is a good point.

• Doesn't use ocamlfind to install library

ocamlfind allow to install library. Using it is the best way to install your ocaml library. Moreovoer, you should use the most simple way to install. For pure OCaml library this is straightforward and allow Debian packager to override destination directory by using environment variable OCAMLFIND_DESTDIR.

install:
      ocamlfind install toto META toto.mli toto.cmi toto.cmxa toto.cma toto.cmx

For non-pure library, you could add a OCAMLFINDFLAGS variable to allow Debian packager add "-ldconf ignore":

install:
      ocamlfind install $(OCAMLFINDFLAGS) toto META toto.mli toto.cmi toto.cmxa toto.cma toto.cmx

• Doesn't distribute .mli files

".mli" files is the human-readable interface to the library. Even if most OCaml programmers use the ocamldoc HTML API of the library, it is best to distribute these files. In particular, Debian packager use it to automatically generate up-to-date HTML API documentation directly.

• Doesn't distribute .cmx files

".cmx" files contain more informations than ".cmxa". Distributing these files allow application based on the library to be more optimized.

• Forget about other OS files

This one comes from my "Windows experiment". Most of the time upstream author doesn't forget about "*.a" but doesn't add "*.lib" (yes is this windows counterpart of ".a" file).

• Use bad wildcard for file to distribute

This one is not very OCaml specific. In Makefile and sh you have the same wildcard "*.mli". But if the wildcard is not expanded into sh, it just stay as is. It will make the executable called looked for a file "*.mli" literally. Mixing Makefile wildcard and sh is the best option here:

install:
     ocamlfind install $(OCAMLFINDFLAGS) toto META $(wildcard *.mli *.cmi toto.cmxa toto.cma *.cmx)

This way you test and expand to only existing files.

• Use a custom build system

This is more or less a problem. In fact, if everything is fine, there is no problem and you should just forget about this point. If the custom build system is complex and if there is an error in it: it becomes a big problem. I must confess that I have myself done this kind of mistake a lot of time. But looking back, I think that most of the time I should have used directly OCamlMakefile. I think relying on ocamlfind for library installation, simple Makefile, OCamlMakefile, OMake or ocamlbuild, is just enough.

• Missing BTS

This point is a problem for upstream author and communication with packagers (from Debian and other distributions). A bug tracking system is a way to publish, comment, work on and find solution of bugs. If you have a single problem in a library having the bug public helps people to show you what is wrong. Of course, Debian (and Fedora, FreeBSD...) has its own bug tracking system and upstream author can use it directly. This is less work for upstream but tends to make the bug "distribution specific". Having an upstream author BTS helps to track the bug across distributions. If upstream author doesn't like maintaining their own BTS, he/she should consider hosting part of the project on a forge like OCamlCore.org. Even if they don't host the source code, this is still a good idea. That's all. If you have other common problems, feel free to comment, i will add it to the list.

I am often asked for advice about purchasing TVs and consumer electronics. Not that I am any great expert in those areas, but my general experience in specifying and purchasing electronics goods in related to my computer work does translate to other areas (and I know where to find advice on the net). As part of this I get to closely observe what happens when people install new home entertainment systems. I have not observed anyone who uses anywhere near the full function of their system, even using the bare minimum functionality in all areas is very rare. I believe that the first problem with this is the input devices. A remote control is designed around the idea of one button for each high-level command, this can be compared to languages such as Chinese and Japanese which have one character per word. In terms of language evolution it seems that the benefits of having multiple characters became apparent and widely accepted thousands of years ago. Now for a simple input device having one button for each high-level operation makes sense. For the basic functions of a VCR you have PLAY, STOP, Fast-Forward, Rewind, Record, and Eject - 6 buttons is quite reasonable. But then you want slightly advanced features such as “record from 8PM to 9PM on channel A and then record from 10PM to 11PM on channel B” and things become unreasonably difficult. More than 10 years ago I was recommending that people just buy 5 hour tapes and press record before leaving home, getting the full functionality out of a VCR was just too hard. Jokes are often made about people who leave their VCR flashing 12:00 (because it’s too difficult to set the time), I only set the time on a VCR to stop the flashing (flashing lights annoy me). Since programmable VCRs became popular things have only continued to develop. Now it’s not uncommon to have separate remote controls for the TV, VCR, DVD player, and the Cable TV box - a total of four remote controls! This is obviously a problem, and the solution that some people are adopting is to have a single more complex remote control - this is an example of problems not being solved by the same type of thinking that caused them. One of the attempts to solve this is to have everything controlled by a PVR [1]. This means that you have one device recording content (maybe from multiple sources or multiple channels), playing recorded content or live content, and maybe playing DVDs and CDs. Of course then you have a complex remote control for that device which just shifts the problem. To solve these problems we need to consider the entire problem space from a high-level. We start with the signal that is displayed by the TV, it can come from cable TV, digital TV, analogue TV, VCR, or DVD - these input sources have names such as “Composite”, “RCA1″, “RCA2″, “RCA3″, “DTV”, and “ATV”. Often people have written instructions near their TV to map these names to what they do. Obviously the TV needs to be able to be programmed with human friendly names, and as these names are not of much use on their own it should be possible to use compound names and abbreviations. If I want to watch ABC (the Australian Government sponsored TV channel) then I would rather type “ABC” on a keyboard and then have the entertainment system determine whether that maps to “cable:abc”, “dtv:abc”, or “atv:abc” depending on what options are available. The current process of choosing an input source (such as RCA1 mapping to cable TV) and then choosing a channel (102 mapping to ABC) means among other things that it is essentially impossible for a guest to control the TV. A further problem is the lack of available output. While it might seem that a large-screen HDTV has adequate output available, it’s often the case that you don’t want to stop watching one show while trying to find another. When something of wide interest is happening (another war or an election) it’s common for several people in one room to want to watch the news. Having everyone stop watching while someone goes through menus to find a different news channel is not well accepted. It seems to me that we need a separate output mechanism for controlling the entire system from that which is used for the main display. This of course requires integration between all parts of the entertainment system, which shouldn’t be that difficult given the complexity of all the components (every one of which has more compute power than a typical server of 20 years ago). It is currently quite common for PVRs and DVD players to support playing videos from USB and SD devices, so the next logical step is to get an Ethernet port in each device (and maybe have Ethernet switches built in to some of the high-end entertainment hardware). Then XML transferred over HTTP could be used for controlling the different components from a single web server which provides a web-based GUI. While a random guest would not get much functionality out of my TV configuration (or that of most homes where I have assisted in the configuration of new hardware), they shuold be able to use a web-based GUI with ease. For controlling the entire system a NetBook [2] computer such as the EeePC should do well. As high-end TVs cost over $5,000 an EeePC which costs $500 (list price - surely less in bulk) could easily be bundled without much impact on the overall price in the same way that companies selling computers in the $1,000,000 price range used to bundle $10,000 workstations to manage them. An EeePC has abut the same size and mass as four remote controls (so it wouldn’t be inconvenient to use). Also the built-in wifi could be used for the remote control (wires are inconvenient and Infra-Red has limited bandwidth so probably wouldn’t provide a good web based GUI). Also someone who wanted to save some money could instead choose to use an old laptop on a coffee table (any web browser would do). I have deployed Linux desktop machines for some people who had no trouble using it, but who then had trouble using TVs that I configured for them - so I conclude that a modern Linux distribution is significantly more user friendly than the equipment that you find in a modern lounge room. Cable TV companies all seem to be ISPs and often provide compelling value as an ISP service if you want to use the TV service. So it seems that the “Cable Modem” could be built in to the Cable TV box for added savings in hardware purchase and less boxes to manage in the home. This of course would increase the value of a NetBook [2] as a remote control as it could also be used for general Internet access at the same time. TV shows often promote their web sites to their customers and TV advertising also often includes a URL. If the URLs were distributed by VideoText then that would provide more information for the viewers, a better reach for advertisers and people who create the TV shows, and it when it became popular it would save us fom those stupid scrolling news tickers that appear on the bottom of most cable new shows! Some of these benefits are currently achieved by people running MythTV. The first problem with Myth is that it is still largely stuck to the bad old UI paradigm (which of course can be fixed as it’s free software). The next problem is that getting a result of comparable quality to the dedicated hardware is expensive, difficult, or both. A regular PC makes more noise than you desire in your lounge room and configuring a Myth machine for your choice of DTV hardware and the frequencies used in your location is a pain. You can buy a preconfigured machine which solves these problems, but it will be more expensive. For most lounge rooms the cheap Chinese hardware is what will be used. Ultimately I believe that TV will be killed by the Internet. The range of content on the net is increasing and the rate of acceleration is also increasing. TV seems to have not made any significant changes since the introduction of cable and satellite TV (both of which happened a long time ago and were not significant changes). But I don’t expect it to happen soon. I predict another 10 years of the current TV business model. I believe that better integration of home entertainment hardware so that it can obey simpler commands from the user in a more friendly manner while not getting in the way of the main purpose (displaying the TV picture) has the potential to extend the life of the current TV business model. Not that I care whether the TV industry dies sooner or later. I just want to escape from having to provide phone-support to people who can’t get their TV to work correctly!

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_recorder


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook

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If you search for bacula mysql backup on Google you won’t find any recipes to make a backup of your MySQL databases. Sure, you can just copy the files, but then you’ll have a big nasty surprise when you need to restore it. So I decided to make my own script to create a copy of the MySQL database I can back up and restore with Bacula. I run it every day on the server, and it dumps every table to a separate file, overwriting the previous file only if the contents have changed. In this way, when I do an incremental or differential backup, Bacula will copy only those tables whose contents have changed. Of course, consistency among tables is lost, as every table dump is done within a separate transaction, but… well, I’m copying a MySQL database with MyISAM tables, so it’s not like there was much consistency to start with :) And so I leave here the script in case someone else would like to replicate my setup. And if someone else can tell me if there’s a wonderfully simple way to make backups of MySQL databases with Bacula that I’ve somehow overlooked, I’m all ears :)

#!/bin/bash -e
CWD=$(pwd)
[ -n "$1" ] && CWD="$1"
sql()  
        mysql -B "$@"
 
clean()  
        sed 1d   sort -u
 
was_table_modified()  
        UNCHANGED=1
        for dbfile in /var/lib/mysql/$2/$3.*
        do
                if [ "$1" -ot "$dbfile" ]
                then
                        UNCHANGED=0
                fi
        done
        return $UNCHANGED
 
DATABASES=$(echo "SHOW DATABASES"   sql   clean)
for db in $ DATABASES 
do
        [ -d "$CWD/$db" ]   mkdir -p "$CWD/$db"
        TABLES=$(echo "SHOW TABLES"   sql $db   clean)
        for table in $ TABLES 
        do
                FILE="$CWD/$db/$table".gz
                if was_table_modified $FILE $db $table
                then
                        mysqldump --opt $db $table   gzip > "$FILE".new
                        if [ ! -f "$FILE" ]   ! cmp -s "$FILE" "$FILE".new
                        then
                                mv "$FILE".new "$FILE"
                        else
                                rm -f "$FILE".new
                        fi
                fi
        done
done

Interesting conditions today for the 2008 edition of the Chicago Half Marathon, a race I have now done in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007 which is a personal record in itself. While the weather story of the weekend is obviously the aftermath of hurricane Ike in Texas and neighbouring states were millions of people are still without power, we were also hit in a surprisingly hard way here in northwestern Illinois. According to the Tribune all of Chicago had a rain record day and the Chicago River crested causing evacuations. Not pretty. The new race organisers (who had acquired the race since the 2007 event) were standing steadfast and guaranteeing the race 'come rain or shine'. Participation looked decent -- word was of a record turnout of sixteen thousand runners though I am sure some stayed home given yesterday's rain and the forecast for today. Given all that, it turned out to be not that bad. While we had steady rain the whole, it rarely rained that hard. Shoes and socks did get wet towards the end, but it was tolerable overall. I had been worried about the gross humidity we had yesterday --- but today was much better with temperatures in the sixties and little wind. As for the race, I went out somewhat fast but managed to hang on. The Garmin had every mile split below 7:00 min/mile, and I came in at a new personal record of 1:30:51.52. My GPS, an old Garmin 201, also showed the course long at 13.4 miles; a few other runners I talked to had it as correct or long by a lesser amount. The leaves the pace at 6:56 min/mile (or, for Christian, at 4:19 min/km :-) if the half marathon course length was in fact correct, and at 6:47 min/mile (4:13 min/km) if my Garmin had it right. And from now on it's all tapering for the the next big one in two weeks!

Upstream just announced the release of Xfce 4.6 Alpha (codenamed “Pinkie”). I've already prepared some packages, which I won't upload to experimental yet, because the packaging is not yet ready for upload (mainly copyright stuff) and because it's alpha quality, and as we are in testing freeze period, and about (:) to release Lenny, I don't want to mess with that. So, in case you'd like to test them, they are available from my personal repository. As usual, be advised there won't be any official support for those packages. Don't report bugs on Debian BTS, and report software bugs on Xfce bugzilla. Feel free to pass on #debian-xfce on freenode if you need some help, but be prepared to front problems :) Basically there are some new packages:

• xfconf (configuration framework)
• xfce4-settings (xsettings and internal settings daemon)
• libxfce4menu (menu library)

Use apt-get dist-upgrade after updating your apt sources, It'll remove part of Xfce 4.4.2 (and especially xfce-mcs-manager, replaced by xfconf/xfce4-settings) and upgrade another part. Some packages may stay, like libxfce4mcs for example, which is still needed if you use notification-daemon-xfce. This one will be replaced by xfnotifyd at some point in the future (maybe for beta 1). It's advised to do the upgrade from outside of Xfce 4.4.2, just in case. Most settings will be migrated at first run. Look at the new announce for links to know issues, bug reports etc. Happy testing, and remember: don't do that on production boxes.

Since the past few months I've been getting a lot of email at gmail.com not intended for me. Initially I thought it was spam but I realised that people have been inadvertently sending me mail thinking appaji is somebody else. So I get:

• Digitally signed (unencrypted) stock market contract notes
• Business emails like tender plans, press releases etc.
• Bank credit card and Mutual fund account statements
• Match Alerts and frequent updates from jeevansathi.com
• Invitations to web-casts, conferences etc.
• A bunch of personal email, possibly from friends and relatives

Obviously, I also get mail that sometimes says "I did not get your response". I've often tried responding explaining to the senders that I am not who they think I am, but there is no use. There is a LOT of personal or otherwise important information like addresses, phone numbers, financial transactions, passwords to some web-service accounts, domain transfer authorisation keys etc. in these emails. This makes me very uncomfortable.

There's only one week left for D-I translation updates. I wholeheartedly thank Otavio who agreed for such a long string freeze as it allowed me to do my best to get translations completed. And this is a huge communication effort, considering how easily the translators vanish... 46 languages are now qualified for the release, without discussion. Since my last blog entry, welcome back to Greek, Esperanto, Hungarian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Wolof. There are still uncertainties for 14 languages: Amharic, Bengali, Bosnian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Kurdish, Latvian, Macedonian, Northern Sami, Slovenian, Albanian, Tagalog, Ukrainian Again, several of these have *very few missing strings*. In short, if your language is among these 14, there are 6.5 days left (the end of the translation update round is on Saturday 20th midnight UTC). RUSH! What will happen in 6.5 days? I will examine the situation of each of those languages and discuss it with the D-I release managers. On a case by case basis, we will decide together to keep them or not. Etch has 58 supported languages (English included). Lenny currently has 47 that are sure. Will Lenny be the first Debian release ever with *less* supported languages in D-I than the former release? It would give some groung to my claim that Debian translators are currently escaping somewhere else (guess where?).

A common trait of virtually all of the media in Mexico -and, as far as I have been able to see, in Latin America- is the push for society to be afraid. The government and the media (which go hand-in-hand, mainly due to a series of favors owed to each other - currently stemming from the government's illegitimacy and lack of trust from the general population) wants us all to think the country is as violent and as dangerous as it has never been before.
And yes, I cannot and won't try to deny that there are many critical points that need attention - But the answer cannot be militarization, cannot be further restraining the civil liberties, cannot be criminalization.
The only way to prevent crime is to reduce poverty. And poverty is not reduced by giving foreign "investors" (bah, ask people living on cities that border the USA if the maquilas have brought any kind of investment or somehow bettered the living conditions of the population!) access to segments of the economy so far limited to the government - Poverty will only be reduced when the government starts reviewing the tax systems to remove the legal loopholes that make it possible for a large enterprise to get tax exemptions on most of their income, and make the lower income people pay zero taxes, even get social aid.
But back to the topic: Since the 1994 crisis (the "decembrine errors"), we are being constantly bombed about the raging insecurity in Mexico. Maybe we have been bombed with that same ideas for more time, but I was not very politically conscious before that. When things go a bit smoother on the political side, the media relaxes the "we are so fucked" mantram.
When our de facto president current ruler took power, on December 2006, he had so much opposition he could not for months attend a single public event. So far, he is still avoiding them; everywhere he goes, the place must be cleared and sanitized of anybody who might show he just does not agree with the imposition we had. What was his first government action? To decree that every branch of the government would get a 10% budget cut on the salaries - but the security forces (the army, the different police corporations) would have a 46% raise.
After almost two years of ineptitude, they keep chanting the old "oh, we are living such dangerous times" mantra. The security forces recently got yet another raise, and everybody in the media says this country cannot be lived in anymore.
And people buy that crap.
Up to a month or two ago, the general outcry is that the drug lords had taken over the country - And, yes, in several areas of Mexico, their presence is bigger than the official security, or the security agencies are completely coopted by them. But not even His Majesty Felipe Calder n I "El Ileg timo" can say with a straight face that "we are winning the war against the drug lords" (a war brought by himself, of course - Think of it as Mexico's Irak. Think of Calder n as Mexico's Bush.) - A new attention sink was needed.
Of course, this country is not safer than Finland. But crimes do happen there as they happen here. Here, we have got a tremendous movement because of one brutal kidnapping in August, and everybody now thinks that everybody is at risk of dying kidnapped.
So today, after over a month of bombarding us with fear about kidnaps, I am sick of reading stupid reactions. What made me post this was a request for ideas at a local Free Software-related portal about monitoring known potential criminals. Of course, such a proposal would violate the right to anonimity and to lead a personal life even a convicted criminal has. And, of course, the cries of people that think the society should castrate rapists and kill kidnappers, basically going back 4000 years in history. People, let me hand you a stone and a stick so you can club the whole society to death.
The first step towards getting out of this security nightmare perception we have is to be critical towards what the media tells us - and to understand (and _really_ understand. I won't buy your argument that "it's easier to rob somebody for MX$4000 than to work a full day for MX$100", as it's only easier on one level, but it is a tremendous cost on many others) what makes good people act against the society.

It’s not easy to choose a laptop, and part of the problem is that most people don’t seem to start from the use of the laptop. I believe that the following four categories cover the vast majority of the modern use of mobile computers.

1. PDA [1] - can be held in one hand and generally uses a touch-screen. They generally do not resemble a laptop in shape or design.


2. Subnotebook [2] AKA Netbook [3] - a very small laptop that is designed to be very portable. Typically weighing 1KG or less and having multiple design trade-offs to give light weight (such as a small screen and a slow CPU) while still being more powerful than a PDA. The EeePC [4] is a well known example.


3. Laptop [5] - now apparently defined to mean a medium size portable computer, light enough to be carried around but with a big enough screen and keyboard that many people will be happy to use them for 8 hours a day. The word is also used to mean all portable computers that could possibly fit on someone’s lap.


4. Desktop Replacement [6] - a big heavy laptop that is not carried much.

There is some disagreement about the exact number of categories and which category is most appropriate for each machine. There is a range of machines between the Subnotebook and Laptop categories. There is some amount of personal preference involved in determining which category a machine might fall in. For example I find a Thinkpad T series to fit into the “Laptop” category (and I expect that most people would agree with me). But when comparing the weight and height of an average 10yo child to an adult it seems that a 10yo would find an EeePC to be as much effort to carry as a T series Thinkpad is for an adult. It seems to me that the first thing that you need to do when choosing a laptop is to decide which of the above categories is most appropriate. While the boundaries between the categories are blurry and to some extent are limited by personal preference it’s an easy second step to determine which machines fit the category you have selected (in your opinion) once you have made a firm decision on the category. It’s also possible to choose a half-way point, for example if you wanted something on the border of the “Laptop” and NetBook categories then a Thinkpad X series might do the job. The next step of course is to determine which OSs and applications you want to run. There are some situations where the choice of OS and/or applications may force you to choose a category that has more powerful hardware (a CPU with more speed or features, more RAM, or more storage). For example a PDA generally won’t run a regular OS well (if at all) due to the limited options available for input devices and the very limited screen resolution. Even a NetBook has limitations as to what software runs well (for example many applications require a minimum resolution of 800×600 and don’t work well on an EeePC 701). Also Xen can not be used on the low-end CPUs used in some NetBooks which lack PAE. Once you have chosen a category you have to look for features which make sense for that category. A major criteria for a PDA is how fast you can turn it on, it should be possible to go from standby to full use in less than one second. Another major criteria is how long the battery lasts, it should compare to a mobile phone (several days on standby and 8 hours of active use). A criteria that is important to some people is the ability to use both portrait and landscape views for different actions (I use portrait for editing and landscape for reading). A NetBook is likely to be used in many places and needs to have a screen that will work well in adverse lighting conditions (a shiny reflective screen is a really bad thing), it also needs to be reasonably resilient as it is going to get bumped if it is transported a lot (a solid state disk is a good feature). It should also be as light as possible while having enough hardware to run a regular OS (an EeePC 701 with 512M of RAM and 4G of storage is about the minimum hardware for running a regular distribution of Linux). A desktop replacement needs to have all the features, lots of RAM, a fast CPU and video hardware, and a big screen - it also needs a good keyboard (test by typing your name several times). The “Laptop” category is much the same as the desktop replacement, but a bit smaller, a lot lighter, and better battery life. It seems very difficult to give any specific advice as to which laptop to buy when the person who wants the advice has not chosen a category (which is often the case).

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pda


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subnotebook


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeepc


• [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laptop


• [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_replacement_computer

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After reading on Jimmy Schementi's weblog that IronPython, the .NET implementation of Python, is just an apt-get install ironpython away, I thought I'd give it a whirl. Here's what I got. Huh? Maybe Microsoft took that "significant whitespace" thing a little too literally... It turns out that IronPython really wants you to use a dark background (bug report). Ah, so that's why the background of Jimmy's blog is black! As you can see from the screenshot, it's also a bit difficult to quit from the Ubuntu version of IronPython. That weird symbol is a result of pressing Ctrl+D. Even Ctrl+\, which usually helps in such cases, only produces a nasty .NET CLR traceback with no ill effects to the interpreter. On the bright side, this is a good start. IronPython seems to be more or less functional, with speed comparable to CPython, even though the example code included in Debian looks a little "heavy" (see /usr/share/doc/ironpython/Tutorial).

The Linux kernel source relies on a case sensitive filesystem. If you attempt to get the sources via git this will manifest as an error along the lines of:

fatal: Entry 'include/linux/netfilter/xt_CONNMARK.h

There are several header files like this the names of which differ only in case and just can’t be represented on a filesystem that doesn’t distinguish between cases. This is most commonly seen by people attempting to build embedded Linux from Windows.

Logging on the Freerunner By default, the FreeRunner comes without a system log daemon, and rightfully so, because you don't want a daemon filling up /var, and a nightly cron job to rotate logs, on a mobile phone. However, I do not want to give up logging. If there are bugs I want to investigate, I like to be able to look at the logs. The solution: remote logging. Configure the phone to send all log info via UDP to my laptop, and configure my laptop to listen for UDP syslog messages from the phone only. How to do it:

1. apt-get install rsyslog (see below how other logging daemons fail)
2. Add a /etc/hosts entry for the laptop on the phone: 192.168.0.200 base
3. Add a /etc/hosts entry for the phone on the laptop: 192.168.0.202 openmoko
4. Replace the phone's rsyslog rules to send everything to the laptop:

   ################
   ##### RULES ####
   ################
   # Everything goes to the main computer, via UDP, if available
   *.*     @base
   #
   # Emergencies are sent to everybody logged in.
   #
   *.emerg                         *
   
   

5. Tell the laptop's rsyslog to accept UDP messages from the phone only:

   # provides UDP syslog reception
   $ModLoad imudp
   $UDPServerRun 514
   $UDPServerAddress 192.168.0.200
   
   

That is all. When the phone is not connected, the UDP packets from the logger will go nowhere. When it gets connected to the laptop, a script is triggered that creates the 192.168.0.200 interface, rsyslogd will listen on that interface and the UDP packets will be logged. This has the extra potential to be able to get error messages in case of bugs in the SD card driver, which I seem to hit from time to time. Why rsyslog sysklogd could receive the messages from the phone, but can only listen on all interfaces, and therefore requires me to set up firewall on my laptop in order to get packets from the phone only. syslog-ng can and can be told to listen on a given interface, but it will refuse to start if that interface isn't available. Since the phone is on an hotplugged interface that comes and goes, this is totally unacceptable. And finally, rsyslog is going to replace sysklogd both in Debian and in Fedora, so it's just as well a good excuse to switch.

Init Seven, my favourite Swiss ISP, has offered to collocate one of my machines in their racks with native IPv6-connectivity. I am now searching for a name for this new host. A recent discussion has made me curious about how many people can deduce my host naming theme from the set of names of currently operational machines under the madduck.net domain:

albatross, bell, brick, cigar, cirrus, clegg, diamond, echo, embryo, eugene, fishbowl, gerald, gnome, lapse, lust, mother, pict, pig, piper, pulse, seamus, sheep, time, vera, wall.

If you know what ties this list together, please help me christen the new machine! Update: the responses have been overwhelming, 183 people have written in so far, and 149 of them knew what s going on (though some admitted to cheating with a search engine). Thanks to everyone! In addition to the common theme, which most guessed correctly, I have a few other restrictions, mainly that the words have to be singular names or nouns, and that they have to feel right . Here are the suggestions I ve received which passed my filters, in decreasing order of frequency:

emily, lucifer, fletcher, lunatic, arnold, flesh, gig, bike, moon, brain, hand, balloon, hope, alan, marmelade, wing, heart, summer, thunder, sam, tropez, sky, stethoscope, khyber, lotus, jugband, cymbaline, remergence, dawn, hell, desert, worm, eclipse, dog, sysyphus, julia, scarecrow, sun, overdrive, vizier, matilda, eiderdown, babe, pillow, funkydung, atom, fore, shout, breast, domine, swan, charade, grantchester, money.

Curiously, I forgot about worm and wing, which are in use, so those are out. Some of them are not candidates because I d mistype them all the time ( stethoscope , cymbaline , sysyphus , remergence , scarecrow , eiderdown , marmelade , grantchester ). Some just don t seem right ( tropez , shout , overdrive , flesh , breast , sky , jugband , eclipse , lucifer , money ) Some are not appropriate as hostname for computers ( brain , heart , damage , hell , lunatic , babe ). Those who suggested machine were referred to my SMTP servers greeting banner. I have to scratch fletcher and desert because of their source. I have to do the same to thunder , unfortunately. And I ought to retire pulse , although not really. Noone suggested grimble and crumble . As there are so many, and so many more, I am changing my rule to significant, enigmatic, and memorable singular nouns and names , which brings us down to:

arnold, gig, bike, moon, alan, khyber, lotus, julia, sun, vizier, matilda, atom, domine, swan, charade, grimble, crumble.

Given that list, I think I will be launching gig, khyber, lotus, charade, vizier, domine, and/or swan in the near future. Or if it s a pair, it ll be grimble and crumble. Thanks all, this was fun. PS: you may use the same naming scheme for your hosts, but you take full responsibility in case you and I ever have to fuse networks in any way. NP: Riverside: Out of Myself

I recently wasted a bit of time reading some right-wing blogs. One thing I noted was the repeated references to news reports about young women from an Islamic background being beaten (and in some cases killed) by their fathers (and other male relatives) for not conforming to some weird cultural ideas that some people associate with Islam. These are spun as examples of Islam being bad and therefore opposing immigration policies that allow Muslims into countries identified as “Christendom” or “The West” (never mind the fact that the vast majority of the population in “Christendom” don’t even attend church twice a year and the fact that Australia is directly south of China, Russia, and North Korea). It seems to me that when young people follow the cultural standards of the country where they live rather than the standards of the country that their parents came from then it’s evidence of “multiculturalism” working. When young Muslim women are beaten by their fathers whether it’s considered an example of Muslims being bad (and who therefore should be excluded) or an example of Muslims as victims who should be protected is a matter of interpretation. It’s not as if there is any shortage of domestic violence cases from any religious or cultural group. It’s often claimed that fundamentalist Muslims hate our culture, strangely the same people seem to claim that our culture will be destroyed by radical Islam. These two ideas seem to conflict, if our culture (the pro-science, free-speech, few inhibitions on clothing standards, do what you want but don’t hurt others culture that most readers of my blog enjoy) can be destroyed by radical Islam then they wouldn’t hate it. I think that the reason why fundamentalist religious people (Christians and Muslims) dislike our culture is because it is so strong. Our culture offers a way of life that is simply better than that which fundamentalist religious groups offer. Any religious person can choose to take a liberal approach to their religion (emphasising the positive aspects of giving to charity, being nice to others, etc) and enjoy our culture. Our culture is based around wide-spread communication, mass media, mobile phones, the Internet, custom clothing design, etc. It can do to religions what the sea does to rocks. It seems that the strongest efforts at attacking our culture come from Christian groups. For example the Exclusive Bretheren [1] runs a high school in my area, according to a local paper it distinguishes itself by having no students enter a university course! The Exclusive Bretheren (and some other radical Christian groups) have a deliberate policy of keeping children stupid with the idea that people who think may decide to change their religion. Some time ago I had a taxi driver start an unsolicited discussion of religion by telling me how much he hated Muslims. I pointed out the fact that there are Muslims of all races and asked why he thought that I was not a Muslim. After that the rest of the journey was very quiet. The mainstream media would have us believe that Muslims have some sort of monopoly on terrorism. Noam Chomsky’s paper “Terror and Just Response” [2] is one of many that he has written on this issue. I realise that many people don’t want to acknowledge the involvement of the US government (and it’s allies such as Australia) in international terrorism. But please read Noam’s position (which is compelling) or read his wikipedia page which lists his extensive accomplishments [3] (if it’s the background of an author that impresses you).

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_Bretheren


• [2] http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20020702.htm


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_chomsky

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My primary e-mail domain deuxchevaux.org was offline for one and a half week due to my (former) domain provider Korypet went bankrupt and probably hadn’t paid the registrar’s invoice for deuxchevaux.org although I had paid Korypet’s invoice. (The domain wasn’t expired. Its expiration date was somewhen in 2009.) Korypet itself just told its customers (and told it only on request) that they a) will shut down their business because it doesn’t pay off and that b) their service won’t be as good as usual since their head is currently in hospital. I should have noticed that there is something fishy and some details were missing at lastest when they told customers (also only on request) that they have to shut down some services earlier than announced because one of their providers has terminated their agreement with Korypet at short notice. I also should have expected that they couldn’t keep their promise to continue domains and DNS until May 2009 as they couldn’t keep other promised grace periods. I’m quite sad about how Korypet went down and how bad blood they caused — not only for me — since they offered not only good services for money but also had really good (and personal) support. But I guess that this quality at very low prices was also one of the reasons why they couldn’t keep up their business for longer. I had one of their UML based, low-end virtual “VD” servers for about six years, and used it as secondary DNS server and IRC client host. I also often thought about getting a second one at some other geographical location (they offered virtual servers in three German cities). That was the reason why I started to move my domains to them a while ago. They even could fully answer me domain registration questions for which the eDNS and the Hetzner staff only had partial and therefore confusing answers. Since it was the easiest way, I tried to transfer the domains I had registered with Korypet to the B2C division of their registrar Key Systems, to DomainDiscount24. The web interface isn’t as bad as the name “DomainDiscount24” suggests, but they seem to have communication problems if – as in this case – more than one of their business divisions are involved. It took at least two phone calls until they did the all the necessary things to get the domains transferred from Korypet’s business customer account to my newly created end customer account although they have a special form for former Korypet customers. Domains I registered after Korypet stopped accepting new domains (well, they just didn’t answer on my domain registration requests anymore) I have registered via eDNS which was a recommendation form someone on the DaLUG mailing list. My conclusion after these hassles: No more domain registration resellers, only directly interacting with registrars. Never register all domains at the same company. Have more than two DNS servers at different hosters. Don’t have domain registrations and DNS servers at the same company. So I now register my domains either at DomainDiscount24 or at eDNS. And .ch domains of course directly at SWITCH. (If only all domain registrations would be so simple and uncomplicated as with SWITCH!) And my DNS servers are currently hosted at x encon in Hannover (Yes, it’s a Xen DomU :-) and Hetzner in Erlangen. And a third one in Switzerland is already planned.